Is my video card my bottleneck?

[nedfunnell]

Hello all,
I just repaired a 50" HDTV that I got at Goodwill for $50 and now it's working. YES! (It's a Sony KDS-R50XBR1)

I am excited to have this TV but a bit disappointed in the way my laptop plays with it. When I play back 720p video, I get some choppiness. I notice it most in sweeping shots, like I would expect from low framerate. Could this be caused by my graphics card just not being able to keep up?

It's a 1920x1080 TV. Display at both the native resolution and when I change it to 720p in my nVidia control panel display the choppiness.

My PC is a Dell M1530 notebook with a 8600M GT. I am displaying over HDMI with the TV configured as an additional display.

If my graphics card is in fact the bottleneck, is there any way to address this?

 

[TJCS]

- Update to latest nvidia drivers
- Check if hardware decoding is enabled in your video player.
- Update your video player(try latest VLC 2.0.5).
- Make sure your dell is not overheating.
- Test GPU hardware acceleration with youtube 720p/1080p using the latest chrome/firefox(install latest adobe flash).
- Ensure your video file is not fudge(badly encoded).

I really doubt that card is the problem. I remember playing 720p on an old pentium 4 with nvidia 7600gs, and it doesn't stutter. Don't know what CPU you got but it's hard to imagine that it can't handle 720p.

 

[Greenlepricon]

That is odd. Does it work at lower resolutions?

 

[BrightCandle]

Does the 8600 and the TV both support 23.94 hz? A lot of graphics cards don't support it and many TVs are not switched into the right mode for perfect movie playback.

 

[nathan88]

If the video uses Flash, then the issue could be hardware acceleration which you can disable by right clicking on a youtube video and unchecking hardware acceleration. Make sure to update all drivers and see what happens.

 

[zCypher]

Does the same thing happen when you're playing it only on the laptop, or is the issue only affecting the HDMI output?

 

[netarangi]

What are you using for a video player

 

[tweakboy]

So this happens only with 720p ,,,,,,, if you go 1080p the flickering is gone uh ?

 

[KingFatty]

I have the same video card, which is not the problem because it works fine on even higher-resolution video sources with no choppiness.

The video card is great for playing full-screen blu-ray or other 1080p video sources, silky smooth. It works for streaming video too, so long as you are using the GPU hardware acceleration.

You just need to make sure you are decoding the video using the GPU hardware acceleration.

Sounds to me like you are using the CPU, *and* you have a very very slow CPU?

 

[nedfunnell]

I am updating my nVidia drivers to 310.x from 306.x (7 months old I think).

I was using VLC 1.1.8, updating that too, to 2.0.4.

My 'Use hardware acceleration' box was not ticked- who knew! I bet that was it. I will check this issue again after updates and reboots are finished.